An Even (er) Slower Burn (er)

My last post was in July, and wow, time flies when you have an infant. I’ve been busy with a variety of things, least of which is my own work, which I try and showcase it here as much as I can. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, maybe what I say here might seem redundant or irrelevant, but sometimes 140 characters or a status update just isn’t enough to let one’s voice come out. So I think of this blog as my own headphones, so to speak, to check and see how I sound to myself and to others.

Of course, I still feel the pressure to branch out onto Tumblr, since it seems that’s where all the cool kids are these days, but I can barely manage to update all my other sites, social media or otherwise, that I think I’ll still wait a bit more on that one. Keeping up with that is obviously what gets people to notice my work, but if I don’t even have new work to show, then what’s the point?

From about June throughout August I was just working non-stop, nearly 12 hour days, including weekends. I got burned out, and both my professional and personal work suffered. Starting in September, I tried to balance things out more by not taking on any more freelance work for a while; good plan, except that was the beginning of a month full of computer issues, more than I’ve ever had in my life. After segmentation fault errors, bus errors, finder crashes (I use a Mac, mind you), replacing the logic board, reformatting my system from scratch onto a new OS X (I’m on Mountain Lion now), kernel panics, and MULTIPLE trips to the Apple Store, it seems that finally my computer is stable enough for me to try and get back to work, and to make blog posts.

It’s been a rough month and half, but nothing brings me more joy now than to get back working on my comic, which might as well be the slowest serialized webcomic out there, but whatever, I gotta keep going. Every time I rough out another chapter, and I can see how everything will be laid out and written, I get really excited; so when the process of actually drawing and cleaning up begins, it all slows down again – maybe I’m trying too hard, or maybe I just wanna enjoy drawing something worthy of my time, but dammit, even with a Cintiq, and my recently purchased Adobe CS6 license (yeah, there goes some of my savings), I can’t seem to move faster in this sense. I guess the only way to do it really is to quit my day job and devote to this entirely; not that I haven’t thought about that, but let’s be realistic: I don’t even know if I have an audience for this comic, let alone one that would support me on a kickstarter kind of way, so while plans to make this my one and only gig seem stagnant, the drive and idea isn’t, which I guess in the long run is more important? Perhaps, though I fear losing the drive due to lack of a proper strategy to keep this comic moving forward.

Of course, that wouldn’t mean that I’d stop doing personal work altogether, but maybe I’d focus on more occasional sketches and illustrations here and there… here’s the thing though: I’m not really looking for immediate gratification for my work. I really don’t have a need for that; I do feel an urge to tell long narratives with characters that live and breath beyond just the spectacle of the medium. And it seems that it’s the kind of thing I just keep on doing, whether I make money from it or not, or whether I end up only working on it for about an hour or two a week. And even at that, I can’t stop. I just can’t stop creating, all the time.

On that note, here are few work in progress frames from Chapter 6. It’s gonna be a more toned down chapter from the last one, but believe me, there are some interesting developments in the plot if you’re following it. These girls are so driven that sometimes I even have a hard time keeping up with the writing; they’re almost writing themselves!